One Per Cent

Soak up the rays without the burn. A wristband that monitors exposure to UV rays allows people to safely soak up the light needed to make vitamin D. The $50 SunFriend went on sale this week at the Wearable Technology Show in London, before general release in May. People input their skin sensitivity – estimated on a scale from 1 to 11 – and LED lights illuminate as their UV exposure increases. The lights flash when it is time to get out of the sun.

"In this case, we took extraordinary actions based on the specific circumstances"John Frank, deputy general counsel at Microsoft, defends his firm's decision to read emails from a journalist's Hotmail account when trying to hunt down a leak. The move has caused outrage among privacy campaigners

Beating Turkey's Twitter blackout

Turkey has blocked access to Twitter after allegations of government corruption were spread using the site. The censorship has been condemned worldwide. People have been quick to find ways to evade the ban, turning to virtual private networks, which let you access Twitter via other countries, and the Tor anonymising network. Twitter itself publicised the fact that people can send tweets via SMS messages.

Robots to talk at TED

Stephen Hawking, Bill Gates and Bono have all done it. Soon robots will have a chance to deliver their own TED talks. That's the next challenge for the field of artificial intelligence, announced last week by the non-profit X Prize Foundation. The rules will be designed with the help of crowdsourcing, but the plan is to give robots 30 minutes to put together and deliver a 3-minute talk on a subject chosen by the audience. Afterwards, they will have to field questions from the host and a panel of experts.

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